With Ezra, it has been said, one stands at the cradle of Judaism. In Jewish tradition he figures as a second Moses. His was the hand that gave a new and lasting shape to the least plastic of all materials that ever reformer had to work upon-the character of the Jewish people. He was the man of his age who set an indelible mark on succeeding ages. If Ezra's great reputation rested solely on what is told of him in the Canonical books, his title to it might be called in question. He certainly appears in those books as a man of sincere piety, of unselfish patriotism, and of unbending firmness of will; but the actual outcome of his reforming energy does not seem very remarkable even where he succeeded, which was not at every point of the line. It would be strange indeed if the comparatively narrow aims which history ascribes to this man had led to such broad results as appear in the whole future development of Judaism. Since the results are undeniably there, and since Jewish opinion is unanimous in attributing them to his influence and activity, one has to conclude that the meagre, disjointed notices of Ezra's career in the Canonical books give a most inadequate conception of what he was, and of what he did for his people. Those autobiographic and biographic fragments, which unfortunately are all that the Jewish chronicler saw fit to preserve, have to be read in the light of the verdict pronounced by posterity upon the man and his labours. They give a certain insight into Ezra's motives and methods, but they leave much untold.
1. The Jewish nation had been almost destroyed by the armies of Nebuchadnezzar, at the close of the seventh century b.c. The Jews were carried away captives, after the custom of the Chaldæans, and taken to Babylon; and there they remained, a people in a strange land, for seventy years. After the capture of Babylon by Cyrus, and through the interposition of Daniel, the captive Israelites were permitted to return to their own land, under the leadership of Zerubbabel. The return from captivity was a trying experience to them. It was one of the transition epochs in a people's history which bring out either the best or the worst in their nature. For a time, it seemed as though their long detention in a foreign land had purged them from idolatry and religious indifference. The work of rebuilding the Temple was carried out by Zerubbabel and the priests; the ritual and ceremonies of the old religion were reinstituted; and a brief period of zeal lighted up the nation. Then a reaction followed: long years of deterioration ensued, and the State seemed to drift towards apostasy once more. The Jews began to intermarry with their heathen neighbours; the Sabbath was neglected; the Temple services and sacrifices were forgotten by great numbers; and general demoralization took place.
Many run from one extreme to another, from licentiousness to the ecstasy of religious feeling, from religious feeling back to licentiousness, not without a “fearful looking for of judgment.” If we could trace the hidden workings of good and evil, they would appear far less surprising and more natural than as they are seen by the outward eye. Our spiritual nature is without spring or chasm, but it has a certain play or freedom which leads very often to consequences the opposite of what we expect. It seems in some instances as if the same religious education had tended to contrary results; in one case to a devout life, in another to a reaction against it.1 [Note: B. Jowett, Epistles of St. Paul, i. 169.]
2. Nearly sixty years pass without any record, and then another colony went back from Babylon to Jerusalem, led by Ezra the scribe. He was a man of inherited greatness; among his ancestors was that chief priest Seraiah who fell victim at Riblah to the vengeance of Nebuchadnezzar, and farther back that Hilkiah who discovered in the Temple the Book of Deuteronomy. But besides being of priestly family, this Ezra was “a ready scribe in the law of Moses,” and that not as a mere legalist, but as one who “set his heart to seek the law of the Lord, and to do it, and to teach in Israel statutes and judgments.” The name “scribe” (Sôpher) denoted under the monarchy an official of the court, a State secretary. After the fall of the monarchy, it had the meaning of a student of Scripture, copying, compiling, and commenting upon it. Ezra the “ready scribe in the law of Moses” was not a mere copyist, nor the author of the law, but a diligent student of the law.
3. Ezra heard of the apostasy in progress in Jerusalem, and longed to go and put the law into effect there, to establish a real hagiocracy, “the law” being the supreme authority in civil and religious affairs alike. Artaxerxes was not so tolerant of foreign religions as Cyrus had been; nevertheless Ezra won his goodwill, and secured a royal edict, clothing him with ample authority to carry out his purpose. This edict has been preserved in Aramaic (Ezr_7:12-26); and while many regard this as a Jewish version, it is in the main trustworthy. All Jews who felt so inclined were free to depart from Babylon; Ezra was authorized to carry the offerings for the Temple made by the king and by the Jews; to purchase sacrificial animals, and to use the rest of the money as he and his brethren saw fit; to draw upon the royal treasury in the province of Syria for further necessary supplies; to exempt the Temple officers and servants from the Persian tax; to appoint officers to execute the law of God, teaching such as were unacquainted with it; and to enforce the law of God and of the Persian king by penalty even to fines, imprisonment, banishment or death.
He accordingly left Babylon, where the king had been holding his winter court, on the first of Nisan, or March (b.c. 458), the seventh year of the new reign. Nine days after his departure he reviewed the Jews who had decided to accompany him to Jerusalem, at a place called Ahava, possibly the modern Hit. But he found no Levites among them, and accordingly sent to Casiphia-a village of unknown situation-to Iddo, and “his brethren the Nethinim,” bidding them bring ministers for the house of God. Thirty-eight Levites soon afterwards joined him along with two hundred and twenty Nethinim, and a fast was proclaimed on the banks of the river or canal of Ahava, for the purpose of asking God to protect the caravan on its way to Syria. After fasting and praying for a safe journey, the company set out, and in four months reached the Holy City.
4. Ezra had now entered on his great work of reform. To his absolute consternation he found that already every wall of separation had been broken down between Israel and the Canaanites round about, till both the domestic life and the public life of Jerusalem was in nothing but in name to be distinguished from the abominations of the nations that their fathers had been brought out of Egypt to avenge and to root out. The priests, the Levites, and the laity had alike made affinity with the heathen population of Canaan, the princes and rulers being “chief in the trespass.” The horror and astonishment of Ezra on hearing of this lapse from purity of blood led him to make a solemn national confession of sin with every mark of humiliation and earnestness. He entreated God for the “remnant that is escaped,” that they might not forfeit their newly acquired place in the Divine favour and be consumed-this time without an escape-by reason of their renewed guilt. His confession was echoed by a very great congregation gathered in the Temple courts, and amid general weeping Shecaniah, one of the company, having himself relations compromised by mixed marriages (Ezr_10:2), came forward with a proposal to take active measures immediately, and ask “the chief priests, the Levites, and all Israel” to “make a covenant” with God to put away their Canaanitish wives.
This sacrifice, so proposed, Ezra judged to be necessary, and demanded it under oath of the congregation then present. An assembly was summoned of all the children of the Captivity. A pathetic picture is drawn of a stormy December day, of men trembling at the great rain and at their own trespass, agreeing with evident reluctance to the separation demanded, but asking for such delay as should secure a judicial treatment of details. After three months' labour, and not without opposition apparently, the work of the court was finished, and many innocent women and children were cast out, as Hagar and Ishmael had been.
Ezra declared this to be the Divine will. It was certainly an action that could be justified only by extreme circumstances. To an impartial onlooker it might seem high-handed, harsh, even cruel. But there could be no doubt as to the perfect purity and integrity of his motives. Unlike most of his adversaries, he had no personal interest in the dispute-no selfish ends to gain. His one ambition was to glorify God and to be of service to his nation. He plunged into this controversy with all the passionate intensity of conviction which belonged to him alike by temperament and by training. But for this unquestionable sincerity, the means he took to bring home to the people his sense of their guilt and danger might have been thought to savour of the theatrical. The scene prepared for them was in the highest degree dramatic; but Ezra's part in it, though not perhaps unstudied, was certainly not acted. He was in deadly earnest; and his vehement expressions of horror and alarm, exaggerated as they might appear were the natural outcome of what he really felt and believed.
In passionate earnestness, Baxter seems without a peer among modern preachers. He could consistently plead with preachers to take their work seriously. “Whatever you do,” he says, “let the people see you are in good earnest. Truly, brethren, they are great works which have to be done, and you must not think that trifling will despatch them. You cannot break men's hearts by jesting with them, or telling them a smooth tale, or pronouncing a gaudy vision. Men will not cast away their dearest pleasure at the drowsy request of one that seemeth not to mean as he speaks, or to care much whether his request be granted or not. With the most of our hearers, the very pronunciation and tone of speech is a great point. The best matter will scarcely move them, if it be not movingly delivered.”1 [Note: G. Eayrs, Richara Baxter and the Revival of Preaching, 47.]
